


(with the roar of the fire) my heart rose to its feet

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: hey brother [3]
Category: Chronicles of the Kencyrath - P. C. Hodgell
Genre: Bonding, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Kendar-Highborn dynamics, Loneliness, Missing Scene, Post-Gates of Tagmeth, Reminiscing, Sort Of, Torisen is present but asleep, arbitrary speculating about that huge 23 year gap where we know basically nothing about tori's life, my inexplicable conviction that Kens ballads involve a lot of slant rhymes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 08:43:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19081519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: Jame set her bowl down on the bedside table with a clatter and blurted, “What was he like, with the Host?  When you first met?  I know—I saw some things.  But.”“But not the things you want to know,” Burr finished for her.“Some of them were,” Jame said.  “He was—brave.  Strong—he always thought I was the strong one, but.”As Torisen sleeps, Burr finds common ground with his lord's strange sister.





	(with the roar of the fire) my heart rose to its feet

**Author's Note:**

> Hello it's me, I read By Demons Possessed and now I have this...thing. Apparently all I ever do in this universe is Emotional Conversations And Worldbuilding.
> 
> This is wicked unbeta'd and I wrote it in thirty-six hours, so. Title is from Would That I by Hozier, which I am _weirdly into_ for this fic.

It had been a while since Burr’s lord landed himself in such dire straits.  Burr considered this as he walked back to Torisen’s rooms, carrying a covered tray with the sort of care that only a great deal of combat training could teach, and wondered if he had allowed himself to become complacent.  His lord’s sister seemed to draw a great deal of attention—and therefore trouble—to herself, and perhaps the uncommonly long time between attempts on Torisen’s life had led Burr to lower his guard.

In all fairness, this had seemed to be a familiar sort of problem at first, Torisen restless and sleepless and, eventually, somewhat senseless.  Burr could be forgiven, in the eyes of logic, for not finding a way to protect his lord from lung-rot and—and something else, something that had left Torisen deep in _dwar_ sleep and kept his sister bent over him like a protective effigy for hours.

Regardless, Burr couldn’t shake the feeling that he should have known, should have done _something_.  He had been spy and servant and left hand and bodyguard and a thousand other things when it came to Torisen, _and yet_.

Still, he had been able to do nothing.

It was difficult not to be scowling when he shouldered open the door to the tower room, to Gothregor itself. 

The voice from the bedchamber was sharp, but not angry.  “Burr?”

“Yes, Lordan.”

He heard the lordan sigh.  Then: “Come on in, he’s still asleep.”

The room no longer smelled of sickness or the strange charred taint that had seemed to cling in the corners.  Now, after hours with the windows open during the day and a thorough visit from Kindrie, it smelled of stone and wind and rain, the smells of Gothregor, clean of the tense and fearful shudder of the past weeks.  The windows were closed now that night had fallen and the fire was ebbing down, settling the room into shadow—the lordan apparently hadn’t felt it necessary to rise from her vigil to light a candle.

This profoundly fixable problem loosened something in Burr’s chest, and he set the covered tray down with a clatter.  He was used to making sure to make noise.  Torisen’s senses were excellent even by Highborn standards, but it was very much like dealing with a suspicious cat.  His lord appreciated knowing that Burr was trying not to startle him, wasn’t trying to sneak about, was keeping Torisen well posted on his doings.  It seemed reasonable to do the same for Jameth—Jamethiel—Jame.

Therefore, Burr didn’t bother to walk quietly as he stepped over to the fireplace, and felt the steady regard of those Knorth-silver eyes on him the whole way.

“I’ve never seen him sleep so near to anyone else,” Burr said, adding another log to the fire.  It wasn’t stifling in the tower room, not anymore, but it was still warm, on Kindrie’s firm recommendation.  Doubtless Torisen would be up and able to ignore such good counsel soon, but until then, as long as his lord was in _dwar_ and unable to argue, Burr intended to take the healer’s recommendations as the word of God.  Jame, who was in all technicality the highest authority in Gothregor until Torisen was awake or until she left, whichever came first, seemed fully in favor of this plan.

“We used to share a bed as children,” Jame remarked.  Her voice was somewhat lower than her usual speaking level, but not by much, more like the tone one might take in a library than in a sickroom.  It was hard to wake someone in _dwar_ , especially someone in as desperate need as Torisen, and keeping quiet was not, as such, much of a concern. 

Sometime in the past hour or so that Burr was gone, updating Rowan and arranging things to his satisfaction, Jame had abandoned her anxious gargoyle-like hovering.  Now she was sitting more comfortably beside Torisen, her back against the headboard and one leg outstretched with the other folded up underneath her in a pose of catlike tidy ease.  It was a pose that Burr recognized, one that he sometimes caught Torisen in when he wasn’t being watched.  She didn’t twitch when Burr glanced her over, just blinked slowly at him. 

When she’d first assumed her vigil, Burr had wondered, with the first stirrings of alarm, if he would be obliged to expel the Knorth Lordan from her brother’s rooms, for the sake of ensuring that Torisen slept well and long enough to recover.  _Dwar_ would get him far, but when he woke, he would need still more rest.  To Burr’s surprise, though, Jame’s nearness didn’t seem to bother Torisen, for all he had avoided her—he had rolled onto his side while Burr was gone, curled toward her, forehead nearly touching her hip.  Her hands were folded neatly into her lap, gloves laid aside for once.  Torisen’s silver-shot hair had been combed away from his face in Burr’s absence, until it was no longer matted with sweat and instead the long curls were tucked back behind his ear.

Burr didn’t say anything.  It wasn’t his place—and besides, he harbored an opinion that it would be good for his lord to have family.  He’d always thought so, had even hoped idly that Torisen might be able to form a contract with someone who would be loyal to him.  Jameth— _Jamethiel_ —of Knorth was a hoyden and a lunatic, a threat, according to very nearly everyone, but no one had ever accused her of disloyalty.

And besides.  She was Highborn, but she was one of them, sort of.  One of Torisen’s people, bound to him by blood rather than by soul, but obviously nearly as frantic at the prospect of losing her brother as they were at the prospect of losing their lord.  Burr didn’t pretend to understand Highborn politics or Highborn women—unless Torisen made good on his threat to turn the Women’s World out on its collective ear, it wasn’t Burr’s problem and he was glad for it—but without a randon collar or Torisen to fight for her chance to get one, Jame would likely be in an even worse position than the Kendar left adrift in the wake of their lord’s death.

Trinity help the Kencyrath, if Jame ever decided she was in quite that severe a situation. 

Burr cleared his throat and gestured to the covered tray on the table.  “I thought you might need something to eat, Lordan.”

“Oh,” Jame said, looking taken aback.  Burr kept his face neutral as her mouth twisted, into the rueful half-grimace he knew so well, and she admitted, “I’m—not especially hungry.”

Burr narrowed his eyes slightly at that.  “Knorths are never hungry,” he said, uncovering the tray and advancing on her stubbornly with an earthenware bowl of simple but hearty stew.  “You need to eat something, Lordan.”  He forced the bowl into her hands and slipped a spoon in before he retreated, leaving her with a half-startled, half-annoyed look on her face. 

There was always a level of danger, when it came to getting forceful with a strange Highborn.  By dint of his lord’s determination to avoid the girl, Burr didn’t know Jame well—it had been a gamble, that she would take the bowl without a fight and without bristling at his high-handedness.  Torisen had let Burr get away with far worse than foisting meals on him whenever Burr thought he’d gone too long without eating.  Burr knew for a fact that some lords had Kendar whipped for far less.  But Burr had bet on the theory that Jame was more like her brother than not, and he had been right.  She scowled at him over the steaming bowl, but took a mouthful without a word.  Burr smiled pleasantly at her and took his own bowl to the chair near the fire.

After several minutes of eating in silence, Jame settled her bowl into the crook of her folded leg and laughed a little, a low chuckle.

“Lordan?”

“I was just thinking,” she said.  “You seem to have experience at that.”

“I’ve been seeing to my lord’s comfort for nearly two decades,” Burr said diplomatically.

Jame grinned.  “Been forcing your lord to eat and sleep semi-regularly for nearly two decades, you mean.”

“I’ve also been doing that, Lordan.”

“Well, glad to hear someone has,” Jame said, lifting her bowl to her lips to drink some of the broth, heavily spiced by a kitchen still reveling in the chance to do it.  Lowering the bowl, Jame poked through the remains of her stew with her spoon for another moment, and then said, “No potatoes?”

“Ah—no.  My apologies.”

She arched an eyebrow at him, apparently amused by something.  “Couldn’t keep them fresh long enough?” 

He shook his head—there were no potatoes to be had in all of Gothregor.  They’d all been sprouting too fast of late to use them before they went bad, although an enterprising cook had planted a good number and was looking at some success with an unseasonably decent crop.  Jame snorted, as if she didn’t need to be told. 

“Brother, you’ll have some explaining to do, I expect,” she told Torisen’s sleeping form.  “That’s all right,” she added to Burr.  “I never really came around to potatoes, despite Tentir’s best efforts.”

“My lord doesn’t like them either,” Burr said with a small, fond smile.  “He’ll eat them, but never by choice.  And our kitchens never keep--”

“Cabbage,” Jame said with him. 

“Yes,” Burr said.  “Did he always hate it, then?”

“He didn’t used to mind it,” she said.  “But once when we were children, we snuck into the kitchens in the border keep while they were preparing cabbage pie.  Tori still ate it, when he had to.  I never touched the stuff again.”

Burr very intentionally did not picture what a cabbage head might look like, deep in the Haunted Lands, and nodded thoughtfully instead. 

It had been a hideously long week, the latest in a series, and Burr had spent the entire time hoping blindly that his lord wouldn’t simply _die_ on him.  He didn’t entirely mean to ask the question, and certainly didn’t mean for it to sound so wistful. 

“What was he like, then?”  

Jame glanced up from her bowl, and Burr felt a sharp rush of heat in his cheeks.  It was something he had always wondered, had even asked Torisen, once or twice, in a roundabout way, and received vague, self-deprecating answers.  If things had been different—if Ganth Grey Lord had not been disgraced and exiled, if Torisen had grown up in his birthright as Knorth heir, in Gothregor, if Burr’s family had been Knorth rather than Ardeth, if the White Hills had never happened, if, if, if—then Burr might have been Torisen’s servant all his life.  Certainly, Torisen, as the cherished only son of the Highlord, would have been watched attentively by Kendar from the start.  Everything about him would have been known by all his father’s people, and if Torisen had grown up the same level-eyed, honorable man he was now, it would have been a point of pride for every one of them.  If Burr had come into that house, when he broke with Ardeth and swore himself to Torisen, he would have known everything, from his lord’s first words to the name of the Kendar artisan who embroidered his coat on the day of his confirmation as heir, within the week.

It was never spoken of, among the Kendar who knew they might have lived that life if things were different, but they all, to some extent, grieved the loss of it.  Torisen Black Lord had stepped into the world at fifteen and had already been a grown man in every way but legally, as much a soldier as any of the Southern Host that took him in.  The Host had taught him how to walk in the world, how to trust the few people he trusted, how to keep faith and keep alive, but he’d come to them with a secret list of truths and understandings about reality that none of them understood.  As far as the Kencyrath at large knew, Torisen had essentially sprung into being fully formed at twenty-seven, hardheaded and mysterious and ready to be both savior and problem.  The Knorth Kendar had never known their lord as a child, and that was, in its way, a tragedy.

It was something that could not be explained to a Highborn.

The silence in the room stretched, long and slow, until Burr thought Jame wasn’t going to answer at all.

Then she said, “He liked to play with my hair.  He let me drag him into all manner of trouble, but he hated to be shouted at if we were caught.  He was being taught the Senethar, and I wasn’t, so I used to drop on him from staircases and startle him into using the moves on me.  He adored our nurse, W--” 

Here she stopped, as if the word had choked her, and she let out a sharp breath.  “He—I don’t know,” she said, sounding suddenly much younger than her twenty-four years.  “He was…gentle, I suppose.  Despite our father’s best efforts.”

Strangely, it was the idea of Torisen playing with someone’s hair that was the most foreign.  Short of fighting, Burr’s lord did not enjoy being touched at the best of times, could be herded clear across a room if Burr made it look like he was planning to do so.  Burr had exploited that fact shamelessly, to force Torisen to sit down, to eat, to sleep.  The idea of Torisen at fifteen, fourteen, even younger, willingly stroking his fingers through Jame’s hair—surely long and magnificently dark even when she was four or five—was so bizarre as to defy imagining.

“Thank you, lady,” Burr murmured as Jame slowly ate a few more mouthfuls of stew.  She seemed almost surprised by her own words, and nearly as surprised by the reverent quality of Burr’s gratitude. 

The words were—precious.  Jame had surely been barely more than a child when Torisen traveled south to the Riverland, with ten years between them, but she had sketched the hasty lines of a boy no living Kendar had ever known.

After a long pause, Jame set her bowl down on the bedside table with a clatter and blurted, “What was he like, with the Host?  When you first met?  I know—I saw some things.  But.”  She stopped and groped visibly for words, her elbows braced hard against her knees and her spine straining forward, as if she was as desperate for answers as Burr had been.

Maybe some things could be explained to Highborn.

“But not the things you want to know,” Burr finished for her.

“Some of them were,” Jame said.  “He was—brave.  Strong—he always thought I was the strong one, but.” 

She made a gesture, jerky and unsure, toward her own hands.  It took a beat for Burr to realize that she was indicating Torisen’s scars, using her own body as a model for his wounds rather than risk disturbing him by touching his exposed right hand.  Then she gave a half-laugh, a cracked-sounding thing shaded with embarrassment and something not unlike regret, and raked her fingers back through her hair. 

“We missed so much of each other’s lives,” she said, almost a whisper, as she combed her hair over one shoulder so that she could pull her claws carefully through the ends.  It seemed to calm her, somewhat, and Burr wondered abruptly if that was how Torisen used to play with her hair, untangling the curls and tugging gently at the end of each coil.  “I just—I shouldn’t have asked.”

“He was afraid of his own shadow,” Burr said, all in a rush before she could retreat back behind the mask that she and her brother seemed to have perfected, up in that border keep.  “Or, I suppose, he was justifiably concerned.  Given everything.  He never seemed surprised when the cadets hazed him, or when something went wrong.  He probably assumed he was going to be assassinated long before he was even of age.”

“He very nearly was,” Jame remarked, neutral, and Burr winced.

“I begged him to fight back,” Burr said.  “He always said that he could withstand anything they threw at him.  I didn’t believe him until—later.”

“Later,” Jame echoed.

“Afterward, the Host took to him,” Burr said, letting his voice lift a bit.  She looked so grim, as though she knew exactly what _later_ had entailed.  Trinity, knowing Torisen’s dreams, she very well might, very well might have seen it—obscure as that comment was—while she was with the Host, or even when she was a child newly separated from a beloved brother.  Perhaps it would lighten some of that darkness shadowing her eyes, to know that things had improved.  “He had people loyal to him, afterward, more every day.  Even with them thinking he was Ardeth’s bastard son.  He fought with the vanguard, he saved us on his escape.  And—and he was just a boy,” Burr admitted, the forced levity fading in the face of the memory of Torisen, so young and Highborn-delicate, and so desperately sick with the wounds on his hands.  Too sick to even be able to tell them how he had escaped, so sick that he never really remembered all of it.  “He wasn’t even sixteen.”

Too young to be there, and too young to be hated.

“Yes,” Jame said, the word edging into a tone that sent a jolt down Burr’s spine.  It was like suddenly realizing that he had been locked in a room with something old and dangerous—not just his lord’s eccentric sister-lordan, but a creature that had drifted out of a song and declared the Highlord hers by the will of the Three-Faced God itself.  Not to be trifled with or angered.

It was, Burr thought nervously as he set down his bowl and tried not to show fear, very much like being in the room when Torisen reached the end of his legendary patience.

“Just a boy,” Jame said, almost purred.  Burr didn’t move, feeling his heart race and his breathing shift to the deep, rapid breaths of someone about enter a battle.  Jame didn’t seem to be looking at him, narrowed eyes fixed instead on the fire.  The room froze, the moment spinning out like a skein of yarn winding tighter and tighter on a spindle, and then—

Jame closed her eyes and the moment broke.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she reopened her eyes, like it was a rote courtesy.  “I believe you were saying something.”

It took Burr a few breaths to be sure that his voice wouldn’t give him away, wouldn’t show how alarmed he had been.  “He was—very much like he is now,” he said, considering his words more carefully this time.  He had forgotten, in the comfortable firelight, his lord safe in bed and Jame making wry comments about potatoes, that the Knorth line threw Shanir berserkers rather a lot, and that even by their standards, Jame was a force to be reckoned with.

Especially when it came to her brother.

“Quiet.  Reliable,” Burr continued.  “He commanded with a care for his soldiers, and they loved him for it.  If he really had been an Ardeth bastard, I think he might have commanded the Host for a long time, and probably been one of the better commanders they’d ever had.  He had a good head for tactics, for gaining the most ground for the least cost.  Even though he never attended Tentir—” he paused here, as Jame made a quiet hissing noise through her teeth, as if at a slight “—even so, the Host loved him.”

“He wanted to go to Tentir,” Jame said.  Her fathomless silver gaze had shifted from the fire back to her brother, and she delicately brushed an escaped thread of hair away from Torisen’s face with the tip of a finger, careful not to touch his skin with the point of her claw.  “Ardeth forbade it.”

“I know,” Burr said.  He remembered when his then-lord had finally made the decree, that Torisen would never go to Tentir, would never hold a randon collar or a scarf of rank.  Torisen had taken the news with the same flat expression he had worn so much in those days, when he was sneered at as a bastard or punished for having bought his post.  Burr had privately argued that Torisen needed training, that he was too young and raw to step directly into the Host, that he needed structure, that the Kendar would look down on him—any number of technical truths to cover the fact that Torisen was a lonely and chronically grim young man who had only ever made one request, and _Burr wanted him to have it_. 

Burr had been given a polite warning to remember who held his loyalty, and Torisen had been denied Tentir.  It had always been inevitable, but watching Torisen stonily hear out the refusal and then march out of the room with the good form and immaculate stoicism of a lifelong soldier had cut Burr to the quick, nearly as much as it had his young charge.

From the wistful way Torisen took reports of his sister’s progress, Burr knew that while the wound had healed, the scar would probably always ache.

Jame looked like she knew it too.

They sat there in silence while the fire popped and crunched through the last of the near-charred log on the bottom, the new log on the top breaking through the charcoal and releasing bursts of sparks as it fell.  Torisen’s breathing, the slow tide of _dwar_ , was the only other sound, so quiet compared to his terrible cough that Burr found himself listening for it carefully.  Just in case.

He didn’t know how long it had been when Jame sighed and stirred, only that the sky outside had gone from the deep purple of late dusk to the blue-black of true night.  She stretched out her folded leg, the one that had been carefully angled to match the line of Torisen’s chest, and pulled the other up, wrapping her arms loosely around the knee.  Burr realized abruptly, her feet revealed by the movement, that she was barefoot, her boots and socks abandoned under the same chair that held her jacket.  Stripped down to shirtsleeves and trousers, rumpled and dissatisfied, she looked remarkably like Torisen.

“So, ran,” Jame said, tipping her head back against the headboard.  She sounded tired, worn thin, and Burr had the distinct sense that, exhausted from worry and whatever disastrous events had been happening at Tagmeth while Gothregor sickened, Jame was letting him see something rare.  “Tell me—tell me something good.”

Burr blinked, feeling slow and befuddled by the nearness of the fire.  “Something good?”

“I only ever see the end of things,” Jame said, her eyes sliding closed.  “Sometimes the terrible parts in the middle.  It’s—in my nature.  Tell me something about my brother being happy.”

“I couldn’t--”

“I don’t want you to betray his trust, Burr,” she said, lowly, and Burr shut his mouth with a click, startled that she had foreseen his alarm at her words.  “Tell me something everyone knows.”  She let out a breath, eyes still closed, and the end of it was a ragged laugh.  “Everyone but me.”

Torisen had always been an outsider, among the Host, because of his mysterious background, because he was not of Tentir, because he had been blooded young and unprepared and had not broken from it.  Burr wondered if Jame was as much an outsider as her brother, an unmasked woman, a Shanir of world-shaking power, the last of a bloodline so old and fantastically strange that she had been cursed with the name of the Mistress herself.  Maybe no amount of time spent as part of a crowd—at Tentir, in the Host, even ruling their own keeps—could ever undo the apparent doom of the Knorth to have only each other.

And not even that, for so many years.

The story that Burr found on his tongue was almost certainly one she had heard before, but—

She had asked for something _good._

“When my lord turned twenty-seven and convinced the lords that he was the son of Ganth Grey Lord,” Burr said, settling back in his chair more comfortably, “half his staff got drunk for a week.  And he was commander of the Host by then, there were quite a few of us.  My lord Blackie was never one for drinking--”

“Blackie,” Jame repeated, her eyes opening and a smile crossing her face.  “I forgot that you called him that.”

“Not so much me,” Burr admitted.  “I was in on the secret.  It felt—alarming, to call a potential Highlord something like that to his face.  But once Harn started it, because of the way he dressed, no one thought to stop.  I’m sure it caused some heart attacks, when word came down that my lord had taken the Highlord’s seat as Torisen Black Lord.”

“I’ll bet he did it on purpose,” she said, sounding pleased at the idea.  “Go on.”

“He was never one for drinking,” Burr went on obligingly.  “And of course Highborn are resilient, when it comes to poisons.  But he didn’t stop us.”

Burr hadn’t been drunk the _entire_ week, unlike some—he had given his last report to Ardeth the night Torisen was accepted, went back to his bunk, didn’t sleep, returned to Ardeth, broke his bond, and went to appeal to Torisen’s good will before noon the next day.  Then, of course, he had duties, including facing the revelation that the wardrobe he had found insufficient for a war leader was _dismally_ unsuited to Lord Knorth, Highlord of the Kencyrath.  

(“You should meet Rue,” was all Jame said to this, and Burr politely did not mention that, in fact, he _had_ met Rue, and given her several suggestions.)

The air of uproarious victory had grown with every Kendar who came to find the last Knorth lord and been accepted with open hands and a gentle smile, and even Torisen, alarmed as he was by the realization of exactly what he had consigned himself to, hadn’t been untouched by it. 

“It took a few days,” Burr admitted, remembering with a fond smile.  “My lord was determined to meet as many who wanted binding as possible, and word traveled like lightning.  The bound Knorth went from myself and Rowan to—eh, two hundred, maybe, in that first week.  Mostly _yondri-gon_ still here in the Riverlands, even some from Tentir, you understand—there were only some twelve of us from the Host, at first.  An honor guard to come north, because Harn said that if Torisen was going to go gamble his life on something so reckless, he might as well live to do it, plus myself and Rowan.  Harn still had the rest.  I hear they went through half a year’s rations of ale when word finally reached them.”

“Harn says the Knorth are giving him grey hairs,” Jame said.  She’d slid down the headboard somewhat, leg canted out to the side, and sounded—happy.  It was such a simple word, for something that Burr very much thought he hadn’t seen before.

“The Knorth are giving all of us grey hairs, if you don’t mind my saying, from Harn all the way down to the babes in arms,” Burr observed without thinking. 

He had a moment of alarm as she looked at him, startled, and then Jame laughed, bright and ringing, leaning forward to brace her elbows on her legs again and shaking her head until her hair rippled all around her like ink in water. 

Watching her laugh, Burr remembered—absurdly—the conversation he’d had with Torisen, two or more years ago now, when the matriarchs had presented him with a girl shorn bald in their quest to ensnare him.  He had said it was because the girl had black hair.  The matriarchs had believed he didn’t like it.  They’d had rather the wrong end of the stick.

“Oh,” Jame gasped as her laughter faded.  “Oh, we are.  I’m so sorry for it.”

“Things could be worse,” Burr admitted, smiling himself.  “But we would appreciate a year or two of rest.”

“I’ll put in a request,” Jame said.  “I believe you were saying something about getting my lord brother drunk.”

“I don’t know the details of the Council,” Burr said, gesturing to indicate Torisen with one hand.  “After he declared himself, all the Kendar servants were sent out, and by the time we were allowed back inside, it was a done matter—my lord standing there wearing the Kenthiar and his best coat, the rest of the lords looking like he’d just slapped them with a catfish.”  Jame snorted at that.  “And so we were all a bit tense, waiting for that damned necklace to decide it didn’t care for him that much after all while he was wearing the thing, waiting for one of the lords to show up and demand that he put it back on again when he wasn’t.  To prove it hadn’t decided to behead him in the meantime, you know.”

“Sounds like a good time.”

“And at first it was us from the Host who wanted bound, that first day,” Burr went on.  “Harn always said he ‘never believed Blackie could make it stick even if he wasn’t delusional,’” he quoted in his best impression of the bigger man’s rumbling bass, gaining another chuckle, “but he sent all unbound Kendar north, _yondri_ more loyal to a good commander who cared about his soldiers than a Riverland lord who would never bind them anyway.  Oathbreakers, all of them.  Torisen bound all twelve of us the first night and the next day, and then we had a few hours to realize what we were in for before the first riders began to arrive.”

Jame was, if nothing else, a good audience.  “Riders?”

“News travels fast.  First thing next morning, someone starts hammering on the keep door, demanding to speak with Lord Knorth.  So I went and looked to see who it was—four post riders who’d been riding all night with letters, and no less than six unbound Kendar, looking to see if it was true.  That was more or less how it went for, ah.  About the next month, really, but it died down to just one or two people a day after that first week.”  Burr crossed his feet at the ankles and remarked, “I don’t think Harn ever did expect to get that honor guard back.”

“Two hundred in a week,” Jame said, with a low whistle.

“I think the lords expected him to burn out,” Burr said, with a note of grim satisfaction.  “Some Highborn can’t bind more than a handful.  But the more Kendar came, the more Kendar my lord bound.  The seventh day, nearly fifty people arrived all at once, just in time for a midday meal—a dozen Kendar had walked, you see, all the way from Restormir, with nothing but the clothes on their back and their own weapons, and picked up more on the way at every keep they passed.  We ended up having a picnic in the outer ward for lack of a big enough table, on rations and whatever we could throw together from the kitchen stores, and Torisen walked around the courtyard while the new arrivals wept and the rest of us celebrated.” 

Jame’s smile had settled more firmly into something idle and fond, eyes distant.  Burr didn’t know her well, but he’d heard—in the way that Kendar always hear—that she was unsure and fumbling and _desperately_ loyal to her people.  That, if she were allowed to bind Kendar, she would be a good lady-lord, even before her rough edges were sanded off.

He wished, a little, for her sake and for Torisen’s sake and maybe even for the rest of them, that she had been there that day, to stand in the sun in Gothregor’s courtyard and clasp hands in her long fingers.  Gothregor had been near-gutted still, only the Council chamber and a small handful of other rooms maintained for the sake of the lords who still met there.  The kitchens were functional, but understocked; the stone walls and roofs were still intact, legacy of good Kendar repairs, but nearly everything else was either broken or breaking.  They had all slept in the inner courtyard the first few nights, even Torisen, who refused to sleep in one of the rooms the other lords had cleared out on the reasonably good argument that it would make him look like a guest in his own keep.

Burr and Rowan had gently shuffled their lord to one side when he protested their collective determination to clear out the innermost keep, the lord’s traditional domain, before anything else.

The Knorth had never been so obviously an impoverished, tattered house as that week, and every wall of Gothregor had rung with laughter anyway.

“By the fourth day, though, there were—oh, sixty of us, maybe,” Burr says, taking a broad guess.  “Or seventy, no more.  Half of his guard had managed to get into the wine cellar, about the only thing that was still stocked with new supplies.  It was after dusk, and we’d started to sort the salvageable furniture from the rest, and Rowan looked at the pile of what we’d need to be getting rid of and said, ‘well, God’s teeth, who wants to have a bonfire.’  And Torisen was already knee deep in letters to get through, so he wasn’t there, and we all looked at each other and decided we were going to do it.  He’d already told us to do whatever we wanted with anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary to the keep’s functioning.”

Burr couldn’t help a bit of a glower there, and Jame chuckled.  “Were you the one who decked out his rooms like that, at first?” she asked. 

“What, all that ornate furniture?  No, not me.  Gothregor—here, Gothregor proper—was locked up, so the other lords couldn’t pick it over, and once we got inside, we did what we could to restore what was already here and left it alone.  My lord lasted longer than I expected before he asked for something—less.  Something simpler.  But then he mostly lived out of his study, and that was where the worst damage was.”  Burr paused.  “How did you know this wasn’t the original furniture?”

Jame made a dismissive hand gesture.  “Dreams.”

“Everyone has them,” Burr filled in, recognizing Torisen’s favorite defense, and she gave him a wry tilt of her head, as if sharing a private joke.  “Well, we had to pull out a few things from the towers, but not as much, and we’d managed to clear out Torisen’s study so that he had somewhere to put the letters without just leaving them all over the Council chamber.  And so Rowan got half the Kendar together to bring all the broken furniture and tapestries too rotted to hang and Trinity knows what else we’d pulled together out into the outer ward, and I took the rest up the tower to kidnap our lord.”

Jame laughed again at that.  “I’m sure he was delighted.”

“We found him up at his desk, with six letters offering contracts spread out around him and this look on his face—I followed that man into battle for twelve years, including Urakarn, and he looked just like that every time.”  Burr shook his head, laughing along with her at the memory of Torisen’s alarm and horror at the first onslaught.  “And when I walked in he looked up and said, ‘Good, Burr, you’re here just in time for me to ask why in Perimal’s name you didn’t talk me out of this.’”

Burr paused for a moment, then said consideringly, “I think it was good for them—the Kendar who didn’t know him.  They swore to him because he was Lord Knorth and they were Knorth Kendar first, last, and most, and if he’d been—cruel, or mad, or just lazy, they still would have stood by him.  But seeing him already at work trying to find a way to make the Knorth strong again, seeing him willing to make a joke to his own servant.  Not all lords are like that.”

“No,” Jame agreed quietly.  “Our father—no.”

“He didn’t put up too much of a fight, and by the time we’d gotten down to the courtyard, Rowan and the others had built a pretty good bonfire on the stone.  Someone rolled out a barrel of wine, and we were up until dawn.  More Kendar showed up a few hours in, so it was for the best that we weren’t able to get my lord drunk, but it was a good night.”

Burr trailed off, remembering the way the fire leapt toward the sky and the way the stone walls threw back shouts and laughter and songs.  Even sixty people—or seventy, no more—weren’t enough to truly crowd the outer ward of Gothregor, looked like a small group against the faded grandeur of the curtain wall, and bedrolls and blankets began to be pulled out some time after midnight, laid out so that Kendar could sit in twos and threes in the firelight, passing wine among them.  The new arrivals had been shocked, to find the dead keep in the midst of such chaotic joy, but Torisen had stepped forward with the fire at his back to welcome them.  He had offered them what food they had and wine or water if they wanted it, comrades to sing with and a fire to warm them, with the assurance that they could discuss matters the next day, if they wanted to.  All but two swore to him in the small hours of the morning, and the last two at dawn.

There had been some talk of getting their lord a chair, after the fire was lit and the initial uproar had faded, on principle.  But Torisen had turned it down, was glad to stand with them, holding his own cup of wine in the scarred hands that had taken them in and smiling faintly all the while.  He didn’t wander, lingering in place with his back to Gothregor’s inner keep, near enough to the fire to stay warm, and the Kendar had come to him in a slow, steady current.  Most were uneasy with the idea of their lord mingling with them, dressed in the plain clothes of a soldier, and unsure of how to talk to the long-lost son of their disgraced lord. 

Burr wasn’t sure Torisen entirely helped matters by being—who he was, but it wasn’t his fault that he looked like an ancient death banner and made people feel like the weight of his regard was enough to buckle the knees.  Some of the Kendar came away from their conversations with him feeling assured that they hadn’t bound themselves to a madman, which was Torisen’s stated hope.  Most came away with a level of reverence that Burr sincerely sympathized with, but seemed to alarm Torisen when he thought about it too much.

All had whispered among themselves about how kind Lord Knorth was, how good-humored, how—yes, how _gentle_.  Maybe the child who played with his sister’s hair and crept into kitchens wasn’t so far gone after all.

Torisen had sung an old song, a ballad he claimed to have learned from his mother, when it was late that night and the fire had begun to burn down, the wine to run out.  It was a love song, one that Burr had never heard from anyone who didn’t learn it from Torisen and rather suspected would have sent the Jaran into paroxysms of joy, about a randon warrior who was in love with an artisan, celebrating that she was coming home alive from war to her sweetheart.  Torisen’s voice was a clear light tenor, and the chorus had been easy to learn, and the Kendar had leaned against each other and swayed along with their lord’s singing.  It had become something of a Knorth tradition, since, and no one asked too many questions about where Torisen had learned it, as long as he kept smiling when he heard one of them sing it.

Jame was humming it now, in the quiet after Burr’s story.  Her voice was a low alto, with a touch of huskiness, possibly natural, possibly from weariness, not entirely unlike her brother’s.  Burr found himself tapping his foot to the core beat, indefinably soothed by the familiar tune.

“ _My love with eyes like crystal, my love with hair like fire_ ,” he sang softly as she reached the chorus.  “ _I’ve fought for lords a-many, and loved you all the while._ ”

“ _I’ve missed you all these years, my soul,”_ Jame sang back, “ _far under shadow’s eaves; now I march home with honor, and pray you wait for me.”_

Burr waited for the last echoes of her voice to fade, then said, “I thought the line was _‘I’ve missed you all these years, my love, upon the battlefield._ ’”

Jame smiled, a crooked thing half-humorous and half-wistful.  “It’s been many years since our mother sang to me.”  She stretched both legs out and folded her arms comfortably, hands tucked out of sight, and added, “Did Tori teach you the song?”

“He sang it that night,” Burr said.  “Most of the Knorth Kendar know it, now.  We sing it to our children.”

“Good,” Jame said, still wearing that strange smile.  “It should be remembered.  It’s—old, very old.  Older than the Fall.  But it’s a beautiful song.”

“About something good,” Burr said, half a question.

“Something good,” Jame agreed quietly.  Then her smile strengthened, taking on her familiar wry edge again, and she said, “Something everyone knows.  Even us, for once.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you just search "Kencyrath" on Tumblr, I run like...50-75% of the blogs that are recommended by the search parameters, but [this one is the one where I make weird asides about Jame and stuff.](https://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com)


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